Ethan Kennerly

I came to IMD's midway thesis show and brought a skull-cleaving headache with me (in lieu of a date). But after lounging on the best seats in the hall, Justin's bean bags, and one of his Advils, I was able to enjoy the party.

Officially this was a set of installations in progress, ranging in completion from the proof of concept almost proven to the prototype online. I didn't get a chance to see all of them, but here's a sample. Justin's own Passively Multiplayer Online Game was indeed online, although not yet a game. The character sheet had a nice visual system for depicting attributes: the size of each attribute icon correlated to the magnitude of that attribute, so a big book icon might indicate a relative literacy of research sites.

Near there, Dooyul Park demonstrated his interactive music visualizer, which cleverly used algorithms to display repeating structures on screen, corresponding to music played in real-time on a keyboard. Once you got past the fact that he constructed his own graphics engine and MIDI interface, the algorithm itself was approachable. L-systems and other parameters (such as hue) were seeded by the keyboard's input. The resultant art was impressive nonetheless, especially in the key-velocity to color and branch angle-seeded mode. This mode created the most dynamic differences of form and contrast. Since the results were projected on a wall in the nearly dark room, the contrast caught people's eyes, almost forcing them to look. And then the angle variety captivated a subset of these onlookers. Dooyul experimented with different elementary objects, so we saw not only the default spike seen at previous performances, but also a crystalline tree shape which both grew and blossomed seemingly in accordance to the emotion of Dooyul's playing. Interestingly enough, pitch was not part of any of the algorithms, but I, at least, had interpretted pitch into the display.

From there it was not a far stretch to find a humbler installation for Eric Nelson's musical RTS. Although on the outside it seemed earlier in development, it was a solid proof of concept for individual unit selection, sample rhythms, as well as an unpopulated 3D space in which the units performed. If for no other reason, I was impressed that he too had coded his own graphics engine and was in the midst of constructing the game engine and symphonic engine. I could already envision (and audialize) hordes of Tolkienesque orcs filling the empty grid beating their war drums. Or perhaps, a sonorous shockwave of storm troopers. Eric, too, talked at length of his engineering and design intentions, which were as grand as the music he wished to symphonize.

Anyone who had attended the thesis proposal night, months ago, knew there was a musical theme in this year's theses. It was insightful to see what progress had been made, comparing that to the memory of the visions put on display that night which now seems so long ago. Vince had a working prototype of a surround sound interface. I don't know anything about sound engineering or its software, yet I found his interface easy to access, requiring almost no instruction.

I had a problem selecting the instrument from a list before I could drag and drop its representation in the virtual sound studio. I kept trying to select the virtual instrument directly, by clicking on it. I also had no idea which instrument on the list corresponded to which in the virtual studio. An icon of the instrument would have been sweet. But those are both easy to address issues, and as is, I already found Vince's interface more usable than the professional sound engineering system that he wisely displayed beside it.

Unfortunately, other musical experiments and ambient chitchat were so loud that I couldn't actually hear audio feedback from Vince's 5.1 speaker setup on whether my orbiting oboe sounded like it was leaping from speaker to speaker.

Aaron Meyers' slick bit torrent visualization system was projected on another section of wall. It felt alien to see the globe from the perspective of a satellite. The squares of torrent activity across the globe and their volumetric ascension into the red-white gradient outer space, was fascinating. It was at home in the party, as it served more of an entertainment than an informational function. Rotating the globe and observing the graphical glucose was a perfect complement to the rest of the party.

If the night before's open house at IMD were an Alice in Wonderland's visit to the mad hatter's lab, then this night was a prescient party. If the progress is seen through to completion, the majority of the works on display would be welcome in a number of tech-trendy nightclubs or posh party houses across the world.

The big hit of the night was Noah's dance floor (actually one that he borrowed...) When I heard the original pitch, I thought it was nuts, but that night it proved to be highlight. The dance floor is essentially a disco dance floor with pressure senstive panels (ala Dance Dance Revolution). On the 10 or 12 foot square dance floor, each 6 inch (or so) panel could be underlit in one of many colors and each panel seemed to be pressure sensitive. Furthermore, the panel's graphics could be programmed to mix fixed graphics with pressure sensitive graphics AND procedural graphics.

So fellow students got their groove on Conway's Game of Life, spawning chaotic gliders or a flurry of critters with each step. They exchanged red electric arcs on a hypnotic blue background. And they emanated square primary and secondary colored shockwaves with each move. Noah himself took it to the next level, DJing the entire time, giving us a beat to mediate our play.

The cross-shaped propagation inspired a desire in me to play on this dance floor: Bomberman ... each dancer setting off bombs and potentially destroying the avatar of the other dancer. Alternatively, I would be curious to see a game of Asteroids, or an homage to Space War played through the steps of the dancers.

And finally, I was reminded of the first time I had danced socially, which was in 1999. As an embarassing testament to my geekhood, this was not in a physical dance room, this was in my MMORPG, Dark Ages. After that Cinderella-esque night of dancing with a charming lady avatar, I immediately enrolled in social dance classes for the next year. Those didn't go so well, not having feedback between the weekly classes on verity of my steps or timing of my steps. Back then, when Dance Dance Revolution was still new, I had wanted to design a social dancing game, one that would teach the nightclub two-step, tango, salsa, and so on. But DDR pads were grossly low-res and too small for such footwork. However the floor that Noah had procured was of a size and resolution that just might work...

Rather than a presentation, this was a party. A fantastic one at that. Like any engineering in progress, it was not, however, without technical glitches. The current in the wires (or in the minds of the MFA candidates) was too great for mere electrical circuits. So a fuse blew. It wasn't long though before the dance floor was again blinking happily and the L-system's limbs were dancing to the keyboard.

Alas, the Advil's amelioration did not last forever, so I found myself leaving without having a chance to properly explore the rest of the exhibits, only catching glimpses of corsets, mobsters, an omni-narrative, potential virtual pickup lines, and phrases of expatiation on Googled adventures. To all on the second half of your adventure: Good luck! and have a safe return.